Situations Pretty Vacant: The FBI Is Hiring Pot Smokers

THIS is rather fun. The FBI, over in the US, is one of the most staid and white bread organisations in the world. They’re cops, of a sort, yes, but the internal culture at the place is still pretty much 50’s America. Flag, Mom and apple pie. And one of the parts of that is that pot smoking is absolutely verboeten.

Yeah, we all know, half the damn country smokes it at some time or another and no one comes to any great harm. But then again the FBI is one of the organisations that has to try and track down the drug dealers so perhaps the policy isn’t entirely stupid. The law is, but given the existence of the law the FBI might not be. But even here they’ve had to relax a little bit: you can apply for a job at the FBI if you have ever smoked pot (something they wouldn’t allow if you had ever robbed a bank) but not if you’ve smoked it in the past three years.

What’s fun is that they’re even having to relax this restriction. Because they need computing types to aid them in tracking down cyber-criminals. And the people who have those sorts of skills seem to come from that part of society where dope smoking is pretty normal. So, it’s either hire the dopers or don’t catch the cyber-criminals:

But FBI Director James B. Comey said Monday that if the FBI hopes to continue to keep pace with cyber criminals, the organization may have to loosen up its no-tolerance policy for hiring those who like to smoke marijuana.

Congress has authorized the FBI to add 2,000 personnel to its rolls this year, and many of those new recruits will be assigned to tackle cyber crimes, a growing priority for the agency. And that’s a problem, Mr. Comey told the White Collar Crime Institute, an annual conference held at the New York City Bar Association in Manhattan. A lot of the nation’s top computer programmers and hacking gurus are also fond of marijuana.

“I have to hire a great work force to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Mr. Comey said.

Of course, having weed being illegal is stupid in and of itself but this is at least a move in hte right direction, even if not a total solution.